Comment 246 for bug 59695
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| Mark Thomas (mark-ubuntu-efaref) wrote | #246 |
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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
Bart,
Disabling the APM feature of a drive can never be a fix. Parking the drives is a feature of the disk, and the The Load_Cycle_Count is supposed to go up, albeit slowly, during normal usage. The point of this bug is that the pathological worst case for load cycling is one access every 30 seconds or so, and Ubuntu is doing this by default.
It is not the place for the operating system to save the user from themselves. You are correct in that the user could write a program that was detrimental to their hardware, but that is their choice. Similary the user can write a program that writes constantly to one area of the disk - this will wear the disk out much faster than the expected life time of the disk, but there is nothing and should be nothing that any OS can do to stop that. We can't stop them from hitting their laptop with a hammer, either. Incidentally, it would be more likely to survive this if the hard drive heads were parked, and disabling APM will disable that.
Furthermore, it has been shown that disabling APM can cause some drives to over-heat, so they will be definitely damaged if you do that, and by putting extra load on the battery you will be reducing its operational lifespan, too.
Rolling out the workaround on every system, including those not currently affected, is a mistake. You will make the experience worse for some people (e.g. me. I have fixed all my idle-writers manually - my disk sleeps like a baby now), and you will make it possible for people to get lazy and ignore the problem, so it will never be fixed properly.
A better short-term workaround would be to monitor the disks, and bring up a pop-up bubble offering to disable APM if the LCC is increasing too fast. I believe someone already suggested this.